Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
connected this oppression more explicitly to the economics of class inequality.
His Invisible Theatre was aimed at training the public to be more
conscious of class difference and to provide them with a forum for articulating
dissent. The didacticism of this approach cannot be denied, but the
artistic means devised to achieve it – an eruption of semi- staged confl ict in
public space, combining scripted acting and unwitting real time dialogue
– is a precedent for much contemporary art that seeks to go unannounced
in public space.
Boal is less known today for Invisible Theatre than for his internationally
acclaimed technique of Forum Theatre, developed in Peru in 1973
following a sobering experience in north- east Brazil when he came to
understand ‘the falsity of the “messenger” form of political theatre’. 70 If
Invisible Theatre requires a great deal of rehearsal (in order to anticipate
every possible outcome from the public), and maintains a division (albeit
invisible) between the actors who attempt to steer the situation and audience
who respond to it, Forum Theatre is more spontaneous, improvised,
and takes place within a protected, educational framework; indeed, Boal
has described it as ‘transitive pedagogy’. 71 Forum Theatre begins with a
situation presented by actors to the audience, who then take the part of the
protagonists to devise alternative courses of action to the events initially
depicted; this can involve the performance of current situations (such as a
factory dispute) or classic works (such as Brecht’s The Jewish Wife), where
the spect- actors are asked, ‘would you do the same thing in her position?’
The aim of Forum Theatre, writes Boal, ‘is not to win, but to learn and to
train. The spect- actors, by acting out their ideas, train for “real life” action;
and actors and audience alike, by playing, learn the possible consequences
of their actions. They learn the arsenal of the oppressors and the possible
tactics and strategies of the oppressed.’ 72 Boal’s aim was to have a constructive
impact on the audience, rather than eliciting emotional responses to the
representation of diffi cult social reality. According to this thinking, the
play as a medium could be used for other purposes, namely, to brainstorm
ways in which reality can be changed. In this way, alienation could be channelled
to directly useful ends as the audience itself assumes the function of
protagonist. Inevitably, this redirects theatre towards education rather than
entertainment, but not in the traditional sense of political theatre; rather, it
is informed by Freire’s rejection of the ‘banking’ model of education in
favour of shared knowledge: ‘it is not the old didactic theatre. It is pedagogical
in the sense that we all learn together, actors and audience’. 73
As a critique of traditional theatre and its conventional fate as compensatory
entertainment or catharsis, the Theatre of the Oppressed is presented
by Boal as the culmination of previous spectatorial paradigms, including
Aristotle, Machiavelli and Brecht. In Aristotelian tragedy, catharsis purifi es
the audience of their antisocial characteristics (through their identifi cation
with the protagonist’s hamartia). The function of this is to maintain social
124